Tag Archives: P3M3®

Anyone can claim to be at the leading edge of the industry or a thought leader, but not many people back themselves and go into print as authors, even fewer get the backing of one of the world’s leading publishing companies such as The TSO.

The lead author was Aspire Europe Managing Director, Rod Sowden and was supported by Geof Leigh, Aspire Assess Director. Together they wrote both the 2007 and 2011 versions of the manual for the OGC and Axelos and helped to establish MSP® as the de facto standard for programme management around the world.

This was jointly written by Rod Sowden and Nick Carter (one of our lead trainers) who had a significant track record as an SRO himself. It addresses the needs of new SROs who come into an intimidating environment and are expected to take full accountability for what is going on. The book is designed to help them keep their ship steady and navigate it safely to an acceptable destination.

This was the first in the Survival Guide series and the first of the publications intended to enhance the MSP® body of knowledge by focusing on the roles, tasks and techniques of each of the roles. The author was Rod Sowden with support from a number of the Aspire Europe team. The book was published in 2015 and filled in many of the gaps that link MSP® to business change and business architecture environments.

This book was written jointly by Rod Sowden and Geof Leigh with support from the internal team. Published in 2016, the book developed a number of the concepts around MSP® and rewrote them for the benefits of programme managers new to MSP® and included large amounts of new materials to help set up programme governance and programme offices.

This book was written by Rod Sowden with the help of Tom Ford. It started life as a set of guidance for one of the Aspire Europe customers, developed into a course and finally became a book. It came as a result of P3M3 assessments and spotting a systemic problem with planning in most organisations. It is a global epidemic, so we wrote the book to help pull all the threads and concepts together into one practical guide which pulls the best out of many bodies of knowledge from around the world.

This is the product which changed the industry. From Version 1, the academic framework developed in 2005 to becoming a globally recognised and internationally adopted standard for measuring performance by 2015. Version 2 in 2008 was developed by Rod Sowden as the lead author, and the update released in 2015 had joint lead authorship with Andy Murray (Outperform and PRINCE2® lead author). In addition, Geof Leigh developed large sections of the model, Sam Jenkins was heavily involved in reviewing and testing the new model, Claire Rookes was the project manager and most members of the team were absorbed in some aspect of review and development.

If you can find an organisation that has contributed more to the industry, we are looking forward to finding out who they are.

MSP®,P3M3® and PRINCE2® are [registered] trade marks of AXELOS Limited, used under permission of AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved.

Assurance – is it a bureaucratic burden or an effective way to avoid failure? It will largely depend on whether you are in a team being challenged or an executive with personal accountability for the result.

Most organisations have a fragmented approach to how integrated assurance is achieved. To have an integrated approach requires multiple layers in the organisation to function coherently. This article explains how to achieve this integration.

The three tier approach clarifies how the models (and terms) fit together:

Organisational capability – assessed using P3M3® and identifies your systemic strengths and weaknesses which can be addressed. To download an interactive overview of P3M3, please click here

Programme and project viability – assessed by independent or peer assurance to provide an objective assessment of the likelihood of success

Gate reviews – line management decisions on whether to continue to invest in the idea

P3M3® is a [registered] trade mark of AXELOS Limited, used under permission of AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved.

As many of you will know, P3M3® is the world’s number one framework for assessing organisational maturity and performance in portfolio, programme and project management. If this is a new concept to you, click here for a quick introduction.

This free briefing (pdf) outlines the key concepts of P3M3. Right click and save as, this link to download the interactive overview, please view it in either Acrobat or Adobe Reader.

You may also be interested in our YouTube channel, which can be found here

P3M3® is a [registered] trade mark of AXELOS Limited, used under permission of AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved.

P3M3® is a [registered] trade mark of AXELOS Limited, used under permission of AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved.

We would like to share with you an interesting case study about the use of P3M3® at the United Nations.

As an operational arm of the United Nations (UN), the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) helps partners deliver around $1 billion worth of aid and development projects every year. The UNOPS mission is to help people build better lives and countries to achieve sustainable development. UNOPS always aims to satisfy or surpass partner expectations by advancing sustainable implementation practices within the development, humanitarian and peacebuilding context.

UNOPS has over 20 years of experience in providing project management, procurement, and infrastructure services to governments, donors and UN organizations. Within those areas, UNOPS focuses on supplementing partner capacities, improving speed, reducing risks, boosting cost- effectiveness and increasing quality. UNOPS operates across 80 countries with over seven thousand personnel, most of whom work in some of the world’s most challenging places. UNOPS is a self- financing organization with a business model that is unique to other entities in the UN system

P3M3® is a [registered] trade mark of AXELOS Limited, used under permission of AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved.

Aspire Europe are pleased to announce that they have been awarded the Network Rail P3M3® assessment contract for 2016/17.

Managing Director, Rod Sowden said “This is one of the largest and most prestigious P3M3 contracts and certainly the biggest since we undertook the whole of Queensland Government in 2012. The team are elated to have won it but we are under no illusions how tough it will be to meet the exacting time frames and standards demanded by Network Rail”

P3M3® is a [registered] trade mark of AXELOS Limited, used under permission of AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved.

Which Agile Framework – Does it Matter? The Implications for a PMO All scaling frameworks share some common patterns: Scrum at the team level, many teams sharing the same backlog, planning done collaboratively across teams, and the general principles of pull, self-organisation and continuous improvement. What does this mean for a PMO? What are the ...

I held a careers coaching session the other day for someone looking to get into a project co-ordination role for the first time. I’m conscious that a lot of the PMO Flashmob topics and themes at events might not be newbie friendly and perhaps we should look into doing something like this in the future. ...

We’re back at Project Challenge this Spring with the usual exhibition stand with our squashy cushions and general red overload thing going on. You’re welcome to join us – just to visit the stand or grab a seat and chat to other people also attending the show. It takes place for just one day this ...

When we were looking at the PMO Trends for 2019, this subject was top of the list. There’s a very strong reason for that. Here’s what I wrote: “If you’re anything like me you’ll be fascinated by all the talk about project data analytics and what can be achieved with data science. You’re probably feeling ...

We’re back with a sponsored webinar which we think you’ll get a lot of value from. Here’s what it’s all about: How engaged is your senior executive team in the project reports you provide them? Discover how to get your execs on board by providing the information they demand in their preferred formats in Kivue’s ...